This is fully loaded vinaigrette recipe is next up in this Vegetarian Tour de France. This recipe comes from what I find is in a cookbook amusingly called “Jean Hewitt’s International Meatless Cookbook: Over 300 Delicious Recipes, Including Many for Fish and Chicken.” Uh, yeah…anyways…

I substituted the red wine vinegar with champagne vinegar and it came out so good that we couldn’t wait the two hours to let the flavors soak in. In fact, it sat for about 15 minutes and was nearly eaten in one sitting. (I can’t really report on how the fully marinated leftovers tasted the next day as they were eaten by another party in this house…)

Just a heads up, the recipe calls for one large red onion. I only used a half of a red onion and found that there were plenty of onions in the salad. A whole onion may overwhelm the dish – but I leave it to your tastes as to how you want to prepare it. That said, you can probably get away with throwing in some more cheese and chickpeas into the mix. I had a lot of the dressing leftover because I didn’t want to over saturate the salad.

I learned the hard way that this is not a make ahead dish. More specifically, by making this dip the night before it was going to be consumed meant that while in the refrigerator the tomatoes and greek yogurt exuded a lot of liquid. As a result, this dip ended up being a little juicy albeit it was still delicious. However, if you are going to just make and serve it, it’s actually pretty durn good.

As winter decides to throw one last winter storm our way, I’ve realized how much I’ve missed the summer. This tomato and parsley salad brought a little taste of summer back into our house. Best of all, I was able to use a lot of the parsley my Aerogarden has been producing. In fact, the parsley was overtaking all the other herbs that were growing. This was a great way to get rid of a lot of it!